British Banking Industry: Britain's Lloyds banking group tells customers in the Netherlands their accounts will be closed

British citizens living in the Netherlands have been contacted by Lloyds banking group to say that their accounts are being closed because it cannot support them post-Brexit. According to advice from the Dutch central bank DNB, after 2020 it will not be possible for British banks to serve normal retail clients based in the Netherlands unless more agreements are made between the UK and the EU. However, some DutchNews.nl readers have already been contacted by Lloyds bank and the Bank of Scotland and been told that their accounts will be closed by the start of November – causing them anger, confusion and potential chaos. Lloyds has proposed to close current and savings accounts and repay the money in the form of a cheque, they have told DutchNews.nl. Angry

Read more at DutchNews.nl:

British citizens living in the Netherlands have been contacted by Lloyds banking group to say that their accounts are being closed because it cannot support them post-Brexit. According to advice from the Dutch central bank DNB, after 2020 it will not be possible for British banks to serve normal retail clients based in the Netherlands unless more agreements are made between the UK and the EU. However, some DutchNews.nl readers have already been contacted by Lloyds bank and the Bank of Scotland and been told that their accounts will be closed by the start of November – causing them anger, confusion and potential chaos. Lloyds has proposed to close current and savings accounts and repay the money in the form of a cheque, they have told DutchNews.nl. Angry

Read more at DutchNews.nl:

British citizens living in the Netherlands have been contacted by Lloyds banking group to say that their accounts are being closed because it cannot support them post-Brexit.

According to advice from the Dutch central bank DNB, after 2020 it will not be possible for British banks to serve normal retail clients based in the Netherlands unless more agreements are made between the UK and the EU.

 However, some DutchNews.nl readers have already been contacted by Lloyds bank and the Bank of Scotland and been told that their accounts will be closed by the start of November – causing them anger, confusion and potential chaos. Lloyds has proposed to close current and savings accounts and repay the money in the form of a cheque, they have told DutchNews.nl.

 Read more at:
Britain's Lloyds banking group tells customers in the Netherlands their accounts will be closed - DutchNews.nl

US banks earnings signal bad news about the US economy — by John Detrixhe

First the good news: The biggest US banks have had time to brace themselves for a wave of losses.

The bad news: They are still bracing themselves to withstand a wave of losses. Their earnings this week suggest the worst is yet to come for the American economy, and that Washington may need to provide even more support for workers and businesses.

Six of the biggest lenders all expect heavy credit defaults and soured loans, as shown by their loan loss provisions, which jumped 43% from the already hair-raising totals in the first quarter to a combined $36 billion in the second quarter.

 Read more at: 
US banks earnings signal bad news about the US economy — Quartz

Denmark-Estonia relations: Danske Bank Money Laundering Probe Expands

The Estonian Prosecutor's Office confirmed on Thursday it expanded the investigation into money laundering through Danske bank’s Estonian branch from two to more than 10 cases that are involving suspicious transactions worth US$ 2 billion.

Prosecutors were previously looking into suspect money flows worth $300 million relating to two separate cases.  

After media broke the story about extensive money laundering in the Estonian branch of Denmark’s biggest bank, Danske launched an investigation into 15,000 of its customers and 200 billion euro (US$222 billion) worth of transactions.

In 2018, the bank admitted that it 6,200 customers had hit the most risk indicators and that most of them have been found to be suspicious. Most of the customers were from Russia and other post-Soviet countries.

The bank closed its branches in the Baltics and promised to cooperate with investigators.

The scandal also triggered worldwide probes and lawsuits.

Read more: Estonia: Danske Bank Money Laundering Probe Expands

Turkey: Erdogan has limited options to save (himself) and Turkey from the financial crisis - by Samia Nakhoul, Dominic Evans

Purge them all, including the economy

After 15 years in power as prime minister and president, Tayyip Erdogan faced down a weak opposition in June elections that swept away any checks and balances to the unchallenged rule he wanted. In Turkey he appears lord of all he surveys.

But his victory could become a poisoned chalice if he cannot resolve an angry feud with President Donald Trump that is pushing his country towards financial crisis.

Erdogan has limited options. Most involve a loss of face or a loss of sovereignty for which he alone would be blamed, having successfully marginalized not just a divided opposition but his own Justice and Development Party (AKP).

His victories in June were decisive. Re-elected as president under a new order modeled more on Vladimir Putin’s Russia than France or the United States, he also secured a parliamentary majority by allying with far-right nationalists.

The role of prime minister was abolished, leaving Erdogan to dominate not just the executive - appointing ministers, chairing the cabinet and replacing top civil servants with political appointees – but also holding sway over the judiciary and the legislature.

Having chosen to rule alone from his vast neo-Ottoman palace in Ankara, he confronts the spiraling crisis alone.

The lira has collapsed by 40 percent this year. Turkish banks that borrowed heavily abroad now face the near impossible task of refinancing short-term debt in expensive dollars and euros.

Bottom-line : the party could be over for President Erdogan very quickly, even violently, once the vast majority of his followers personally start feeling the economic pinch in their own pocket-books, which is now starting to happen at a rapid pace.

Read more: Erdogan has limited options to save Turkey from financial crisis | Reuters

The Netherlands: banking industry electronic transactions work against consumers and in favor of banks during Public holidays and weekends - by RM

Banks in the Netherlands and probably also in many other places around the world are saying they can not make automatic electronic transfers during religious and other public holidays.

The question one should immediately pose ,when the banks make that statement is; why? Why should automatic banking transactions done on public holidays be any different from those done during the regular work week?

 For example: if you make an electronic transfer during the 4 day Easter holiday weekend in the Netherlands, say on Good Friday, to another bank account, the transferred money is immediately electronically debited from your own account, but than, the money only re-appears 4 days later on the account to which it was electronically transferred. before you see that transfer on your statement.

Obviously the question it raises is: WHAT DOES THE BANK DO WITH YOUR MONEY during those four days, or any other amount of time they hold it without telling you where it is or what they do with it during that time ?

What is happening to your money while it is hidden those four days of the Easter weekend or less during other regular Public holidays ?

The answer should not be too difficult to figure out . The bank has probably been making millions on interest and other speculative activities with your money.

If you ask the bank, however,  you will certainly get  a rather vague story.

Something definitely needs to be done here, especially given the bad reputation that banks have gained in recent years during and after the financial crises.

Almere-Digest

Ireland: Dublin is streets ahead of EU rivals as City firms plan for Brexit relocation - by Lisa O'Carroll

In boardrooms across London, bank executives are deciding where to move tens of thousands of jobs in the event of a hard Brexit. Rival European financial centres, including Paris, Frankfurt and Luxembourg, are vying for the business – but Dublin is emerging as the most popular destination.

 Hundreds of banks, insurers, fund managers and other major City firms had until Friday to tell the Bank of England how they intend to cope in the event of a hard Brexit.

Accountants at EY last week said 59 out of the 222 biggest financial services companies in the UK have made public statements about moving staff from Britain to the EU because of Brexit. Dublin, which is still scarred by Ireland’s financial crisis, is the top destination with 19 firms mentioning a possible move to the Irish capital.

Jes Staley, the chief executive of Barclays, which already has significant operations in Ireland, flew there last week to meet taoiseach Leo Varadkar and discuss further expansion across the Irish Sea. “Barclays Bank Ireland, which has a banking licence and which we have operated for almost 40 years, provides a natural base and we are engaging with our regulators in discussions to extend its activities,” the bank said.

Read more: Dublin is streets ahead of EU rivals as City firms plan for Brexit relocation | Business | The Guardian

Italy readies 17 billion euro package to save two failing banks

Italy’s government has said it will spend up to 17 billion euros to rescue the debt-stricken Veneto Banca and Banca Popolare di Vicenza (BPVI). The European Commission quickly approved the plan.

Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan said the government could pay as much as 17 billion euros ($19 billion), although the immediate cost would be a little over 5 billion euros.

Some 4.8 billion euros will be immediately earmarked to "maintain capitalization” of the retail bank Intesa Sanpaolo, which will take on the banks' "good" assets. A further 400 million euros will be set aside as a "guarantee" to Intesa.

The European Commission (EC) quickly approved the plan:  "The European Commission has approved, under EU rules, Italian measures to facilitate the liquidation of BPVI and Veneto Banca under national insolvency law," the EU's executive arm said in a statement on Sunday.

Read more: Italy readies 17 billion euro package to save two failing banks | News | DW | 25.06.2017

Banking Industry EU: JPMorgan to Move Hundreds of Staff from London to Three EU Offices following Brexit

JPMorgan Chase & Co. plans to move hundreds of London-based bankers to expanded offices in Dublin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg as it prepares for the U.K. to lose easy access to the European Union’s single market after Brexit, the firm’s head of investment banking said.

"We are going to use the three banks we already have in Europe as the anchors for our operations," Daniel Pinto said in an interview Tuesday in Riyadh, referring to the New York-based firm’s local entities. "We will have to move hundreds of people in the short term to be ready for day one, when negotiations finish, and then we will look at the longer-term numbers."

Global banks are preparing to move some London-based operations into new or expanded bases inside the EU after British Prime Minister Theresa May triggered the formal mechanism for quitting the 28-nation bloc. Before the June referendum, JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told U.K. employees that as many as 4,000 could be relocated in the event of Brexit. In January, he said that number could be higher -- or lower -- depending on how the government’s negotiations played out.

"We have to plan for a scenario where there is no U.K.-EU passporting deal, and we have to move a substantial portion of our business to continue serving our European clients," Pinto said. "We’ll have to wait to see what kind of deal can be achieved and see what we need to do from there."

Read more: JPMorgan to Move Hundreds of Staff to Three EU Offices on Brexit - Bloomberg

Russia: How a Bank’s Collapse Sparked Russia’s Least Likely Street Protests - by Eva Hartog

A woman holds a sign reading "Mr Trump, Save Our Tatfondbank" as she takes part in a protest in Petrov Park. Yegor Aleyev / TASS

“Remember how hard you worked to earn this money! Surely you're not prepared to just give it away?”

In the days after Tatarstan's second largest bank collapsed, Alexandra Yumanova's post on the Russian social media site Vkontakte became a battle cry for thousands who lost billions of rubles in savings.

The March 3 collapse of Tatfondbank — one of Russia's 50 largest banks — has plunged the oil-rich Tatarstan republic into a protracted political crisis embroiling its highest-ranking politicians and President Vladimir Putin himself.

Angry borrowers, who are demanding their money back, have stormed local government offices chanting “ Shame on you!” and “Resign!” in a string of protests sparked by the bank’s closure.

More than seven thousand have signed a petition calling for the republic’s prime minister, who was also chairman of the bank, to resign. Emotions are also running high on online, where users are holding the highest echelons of Russia’s government responsible.

“It must be tough being a president,” someone called Oxana wrote. “Everyone around you is thieving, but you can't lock anyone up because they're all your own.”
Too Murky to Fail

In recent years, Russia’s Central Bank has closed down around three hundred banks in an effort to clean up the country's infamously murky financial sector — a holdover of the 90s when regulation was minimal.

But the closure of Tatfondbank has demanded the country’s attention both because of its size and its close ties to local government, which owned a 45-percent share in the bank and held positions on its board.

“This is unprecedented,” the head of the news site Banki, Natalya Romanova, said of the bank’s collapse. “It's the first time in Russia's recent history that the license of a quasi-governmental bank has been revoked, let alone that of a region's second biggest largest bank.”

Rumors that Tatfondbank was on the brink of bankruptcy had been circulating for months before the end finally came. In December last year, it came under the temporary administration of the Central Bank regulator which suspended the bank’s operations.

Many who had accounts at the bank took the Central Bank’s intervention as a positive sign that responsible authorities had taken over. Local government officials, including the republic’s head, assured concerned account holders that a deal was being worked out. Even President Vladimir Putin chimed in.

“The Central Bank is working together with the local government to find a way to support all depositors,” the Russian president said on live television late in 2016.

Read  ore: How a Bank’s Collapse Sparked Russia’s Least Likely Street Protests

EU: Spain MPs to probe €60bn bank bailouts- by Sarah Morris

Spanish MPs have voted unanimously to set up a commission to examine mistakes that led to a €60 billion bank bailout in 2012.

In a rare display of unity in Spain's fragmented parliament, all parties signed up to a deal on Wednesday (22 February) to “create a commission to investigate the financial and banking crisis, the listing of savings bank Bankia and its later rescue, the action taken by regulators and the weaknesses, needs and challenges of the financial system”.

In 2012, a government led by current centre-right prime minister Mariano Rajoy sought a bailout from the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) after Bankia requested €22.5 billion in aid just a year after its flotation under the previous Socialist government. Dozens of other savings banks also needed state cash.

The cross-party deal this week came after the opposition Socialists, anti-austerity group Unidos Podemos and Catalan party Republican Left all lodged separate petitions for commissions.

Expected to hear evidence from April for about six months, the parliamentary commission will in particular look at the controversial listing of Bankia, the largest bank bailout still in public control.

In recent years, Spain's courts have looked into hundreds of corruption allegations linked to the property boom. Between July 2015 and September 2016, 399 people were convicted of corruption-related offences like embezzling public money, the General Board of Judicial Power (CGPJ), which oversees Spain’s judiciary, said in a report last month.

The creation of the parliamentary commission comes after the high court said last week it would question the former governor of the Bank of Spain, Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez, over Bankia's regulation.

Five other officials at the central bank and two former senior managers of stock market regulator, the CNMV, will also be questioned.

Read more: Spain MPs to probe €60bn bank bailouts

The Netherlands - banking industry: ABN Amro to slash below board level management from 100 to 40

ABN Amro is planning to reduce the number of senior managers from around 100 to just 40 and is shaking up its executive board to make the bank ‘more client-focused, agile and efficient’.

Among those leaving is Chris Vogelzang, who had been tipped to take over when Gerrit Zalm stood down as chief executive. The managerial jobs to go will run across the level below the executive committee.

The 40 jobs remaining ‘will have a stronger involvement in the strategic direction and the leadership of the bank than before,’ the bank said in a statement. The composition of the ‘top 40’ will be reviewed every year.

‘Over the past few years, the number of bank staff has been reduced considerably but there has been no change in the number of senior managers,’ chief executive Kees van Dijkhuizen said. T

he bank will also have a slimmed down executive board made up of CEO Van Dijkhuizen, chief risk officer Wietze Reehoorn and a new financial boss who has yet to be appointed.

Read more: ABN Amro to slash below board level management from 100 to 40 - DutchNews.nl

Britain - Brexit: IMF predicts 'pain' for UK, as banks prepare London exit- by Peter Teffer

Brexit will not be “without pain”, said the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Christine Lagarde on Wednesday (18 January), as more reports emerged of bank relocating jobs from London.

Lagarde welcomed UK prime minister Theresa May's speech on Tuesday, telling the BBC “less uncertainty is certainly better for the UK economy and for the rest of the European Union”.

  

Read more: IMF predicts 'pain' for UK, as banks prepare London exit

Banking Industry: still free wheeling

The book:The U.S." Government and the Major Banks:Justice for Sale at the Bazaar-By Frank Vogl "

notes: 

"To date, not a single top banker has been put on trial, let alone sent to prison, for the frauds perpetrated by the institutions they lead". 

Obviously the question is Who is kidding whom ?- 

Bottom-Line: Hanky - Panky Capitalism still alive and well.

EU-DIGEST

Banking Industry: Beware the Banksters: Three Banking Syndicates Want to Enslave You

"are you safe from the Banking Industry ?"

If you have been following our articles, you know that we call criminal bankers by this name. They are the modern-day version of gangsters, robber barons, bank robbers, and carpetbaggers. They wear suits, not bandit masks; drive Mercedes and BMWs, instead of riding horses; and use fiat currency and fancy financial instruments, not guns, to hold you up.
 
Previously, we have lumped them all into one moniker, but the time has come for us to examine just who these thieves and robbers are so that you will know who your enemy is. Just as we showed you in our article War of the Titans: Globalism v Nationalism, WWIII has been ongoing for many years, whether we knew it or not. We, regular folks, just living our lives in law-abiding ways, didn’t know we had an enemy or that there was a war going on that had the goal of stealing our country and shredding our constitution. 

The globalists were very cagey in hiding their war against us over the last one hundred years. They set up a system so that we thought our disputes were between Republicans and Democrats, one country against another, or any number of factions that they manufactured for us to keep us from seeing behind their masks. But these were just distractions, like battle camouflage, to keep us from knowing and naming our enemy.

The globalist is our enemy. Thanks to everyone in alternative and social media, we have created our own intel system and the globalist can no longer hide behind their media sycophants. They are reporters, media moguls, politicians, professors and educators, Hollywood distractors, bureaucrats, and anyone who wants to put international agendas ahead of national sovereignty. 

Banksters are Globalists
 
Near the apex of their global pyramid structure, is a group of banker interests that want to gobble up the world and create a 21st Century version of feudalism. We the People will be their serfs and servants. Once locked into this feudal system at a global scale, there will be no place that we or our children can go to escape their control. Ever.  

So let’s get busy and learn who these groups are so that, like globalism, we can call them out and get ground control of this battle. At the end of the article, we have some marching instructions (suggestions) that can actually undo the banksters’ plans for taking control of We the People.

Equally important is to provide you information so that your family’s savings and investments are not stolen by these bandits and thugs. 

For the complete report click here: Beware the Banksters: Three Banking Syndicates Want to Enslave You | The Millennium Report

USA: Bankers No Longer Too Big to Jail? - by Frank Vogl

Some of the world’s biggest banks have overplayed their hand. They have strived at every turn to exert extraordinary political influence in order to get away with criminal violations of the law.

To date, not a single top banking executive has faced a single day in criminal court.

The staggering wrongdoing committed by leading banks includes massive fraud in mortgage lending in the United States, manipulating international interest rates and currency markets, as well as laundering billions of dollars for drug cartels and corrupt politicians.
Rare case of bipartisan agreement

Now, despite the general atmosphere of extreme partisanship, both of America’s major political parties are declaring that the good times are over for the crooked bankers.

The Democratic Party’s “platform,” approved at its convention in Philadelphia, includes the phrase: “Democrats believe that no bank can be too big to fail and no executive too powerful to jail.”

Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s leadership of the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Financial Services published a report titled: “Too Big To Jail: Inside the Obama Justice Department’s decision not to hold Wall Street accountable.”

In recent years, the major banks have agreed to settle a wide array of charges brought against them by U.S. banking authorities, the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

For example, Bank of America has paid over $75 billion in fines, while J.P. Morgan Chase has settled a host of cases for around $40 billion.

Read more: US: Bankers No Longer Too Big to Jail?

Turkey - Banking Industry: PayPal is shutting down in Turkey

Beginning June 6, PayPal will cease operations in Turkey because of the firm’s inability to get a new license from BDDK, a major Turkish financial regulator, according to TechCrunch.

PayPal couldn’t obtain the license because of a new Turkish policy that requires IT systems to be housed within the country — a policy that PayPal, which has data centers across the globe, does not follow, according to Tech Crunch.

The shutdown will reportedly impact “tens of thousands” of businesses and “hundreds of thousands” of customers, who will be able to withdraw funds from their PayPal account and transfer them to a Turkish bank account. PayPal hopes to eventually obtain permits to begin operating again, according to Finextra.

It’s worth noting that Turkey recently launched its own card payment system, called Troy, that will be used by all 29 major banks in the country as part of a push to move to a cashless society, encourage issuers to serve the unbanked market, and make processing cheaper.

The absence of major alternative payment products like PayPal that don't meet regulatory criteria could encourage citizens in the country to seek out more traditional ways of making payments.

If other countries tighten regulations related to IT requirements, global expansion and cross-border processing could become more challenging and costly for digital payment firms.

Read more: PayPal is shutting down in Turkey - Business Insider

European Investment Banking: Europe and Investment Banking Are a Bad Match - by Leonid Bershidsky

Deutsche Bank is undercapitalized and may be facing "insurmountable headwinds," James Chappell, an analyst with the private bank Berenberg, wrote in a recent note. He's not just down on Europe's biggest investment bank, which he thinks should trade at 9 euros ($10.2) per share rather than the current 14.7 euros -- he's irritated with the entire sector, which is dying out in Europe and is still disproportionally powerful in the U.S.

Just a decade ago, Chapell's chief gripe with investment banking -- that it's not very profitable -- would have made no sense. Now, the Berenberg analyst describes it as "an industry in structural decline":

Each weak quarter is seemingly greeted with an excuse that it could have been better if not for the wrong type of volatility, client uncertainty or central bank intervention. Q1 2016 saw the absence of one-off profitable events that have protected revenues in the past. We have perhaps had the first glimpse of what core profitability in the investment banking industry really is (ROEs in the mid-single digits at best) and it could be even worse if the traditional seasonality occurs.

Deutsche Bank, which Berenberg says is more than 40 times levered, in need of fresh capital and at the same time unable to offer a decent return on it, has become a symbol of Europe's failed investment banking ambitions. Before the 2008 financial crisis, European banks sought a foothold on Wall Street, where Deutsche, Barclays and Credit Suisse cracked the "bulge bracket" banking elite to rank alongside the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley. Now they're losing out to U.S. giants even on their home turf, according to Bruegel, a Brussels-based research institute:

Read more Europe and Investment Banking Are a Bad Match - Bloomberg View

US Presidential Elections:."Wall Street’s Business Model Really Is Fraud". says Bernie Sanders - by Richard Eskow

Wall-Street is it rigged?

“I’ve said if the big banks don’t play by the rules, I will break them up.” says Hillary Clinton - Let us hope she keeps her word if elected.

Our nation’s largest and most powerful banks have repeatedly engaged in widespread fraud, causing both individual suffering and a recession that millions of Americans are still living through today.
They continued to commit the same frauds after the American people rescued them, and after they promised to stop as part of some major settlement agreements. There’s no reason to believe they’ve stopped today, and every reason to believe they haven’t.

Fraud is an essential part of Wall Street’s DNA. A 2015 survey, commissioned by law firm Labaton Sucharow, found that a deeply immoral culture had taken root among British and American bankers.
The survey showed that bankers’ ethical behavior is bad and getting worse. The percentage of bankers who believed their own colleagues had engaged in illegal or unethical behavior has nearly doubled since 2012. More than one-third of those earning $500,000 or more annually said they had first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.

It also showed that financial institutions seem to condone, encourage, and protect illegal behavior. The survey found that “nearly one-third of respondents (32 percent) believe compensation structures or bonus plans in place at their company could incentivize employees to compromise ethics or violate the law.” And it found “a proliferation of secrecy policies and agreements that attempt to silence reports of wrongdoing …”

William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in 2013 that there was an “important problem evident within some large financial institutions—the apparent lack of respect for law, regulation and the public trust,” adding: “There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures …”

Which gets us to Bernie Sanders’ often-repeated refrain that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” A “business model” is a plan for making money. Is fraud really an essential part of the way Wall Street banks make money?

When it comes to retail banking – serving ordinary customers – they’ve already all but admitted it. After Congress moved to restrain some of the banks’ cheating and overcharging, a JPMorgan Chase executive said that customers with less than $100,000 in investments and assets would no longer be “profitable” for the megabank.

That’s tantamount to confessing that they need to bilk ordinary customers – by doing things like hiding overdraft charges, making checks bounce by manipulating the order in which they’re cashed, and charging excessive ATM fees – in order to make money as a consumer bank.

But that’s not the only line of business where banks commit fraud. The major offenses committed by our largest banks include “price fixing, bid rigging, market manipulation, money laundering, document forgery, lying to investors, sanctions-evading, and tax dodging.”

Wall Street has now paid more than $200 billion in fines and settlements for fraudulent activity. This almost unimaginable sum can be broken down into slightly more digestible (though still enormous) portions by looking at the amounts paid by individual banks.

As of last October, Bank of America had paid more than $77 billion to settle fraud charges. Citigroup, the megabank created with bipartisan cooperation from Republican Senator Phil Gramm and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (who later became the bank’s chief executive), had paid nearly $20 billion.

(Newly released papers from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission show that the Commission voted to refer Rubin to the Justice Department for investigation, but there is no evidence that any action was taken.)

JPMorgan Chase, the bank that was once held up by pundits and politicians as the model of a well-run financial institution, paid more than $30 billion in fines and settlements over four years.

A new book entitled “JPMadoff” explores the bank’s relationship with the infamous Bernie Madoff, as well as its other ethical failures. Its authors listed many of JPMorgan Chase’s frauds in a letter to the US Department of Labor. Those offenses, along with the ones documented in a 2013 investors’ report

 Read more: Bernie’s Right. Wall Street’s Business Model Really Is Fraud. - NationofChange | Progressive Change Through Positive Action

Economy: Eurozone slowdown worsens as businesses report another difficult month

More signs have emerged of a eurozone slowdown. The latest surveys of the region’s businesses indicate they had their worst month in over a year.

The growth rate for the largest economies – Germany, France, Italy and Spain – declined.

In the dominant service industry France was the worst performer, showing further contraction.

Businesses also cut their prices more deeply than in previous months and services firms were less optimistic about the year ahead than they were in January.

Jeremy Batstone-Carr, chief economist at Charles Stanley said it is no surprise: “It’s certainly our view that eurozone economic activity has toned down. There are multiple concerns over uncertainty surrounding the eurozone.

There’s the banking sector, there’s the Brexit, there’s Ukraine going on. There’s weak government or no government in Spain. We’ve got extremist political parties. There’s uncertainty over Angela Merkel’s position as chancellor of Germany and of course there is this debate as to the effectiveness of the ECB’s policy as well, so little wonder that the business sector is cautious.”

For the European Central Bank, the surveys of 5,000 manufacturing firms and service providers across the eurozone do not make happy reading.

The ECB meets on March 10 and will try to find more ways to stimulate the economy. It is likely to cut the already negative deposit rate it offers to banks when they keep money in its vaults.

There is also a chance the central bank would increase the size of its bond-buying programme from 60 billion euro a month.

Read more: Eurozone slowdown worsens as businesses report another difficult month | euronews, economy

Central Banks: Timid central bankers have failed to convince sceptical audience

The job of central bankers more like that of technicians, carefully turning knobs as they fine-tune the economy, or magicians, manipulating the audience into the suspension of disbelief? Most of the time it is the former. Monetary maestros nudge interest rates up and down with meticulous precision.

Yet in extreme cases—such as when economies become trapped in a low-growth rut—central bankers must try to conjure up a change in the public’s economic outlook. Just as uncertain magicians often fail to pull off their tricks, so central banks are finding their audiences in an ever-more sceptical mood.

Economists have long acknowledged the role of mass psychology in business cycles. In 1936 John Maynard Keynes described the “animal spirits” that could drive swings in spending or investment.

The power of an abrupt change in market beliefs came sharply into focus in the early 1980s, when many economies were struggling to clamp down on stubbornly high inflation. Economists at the time worried that using interest rates to rein in inflation would be enormously costly.

Because the public had come to expect high inflation, they reckoned, growth-crushing rate rises would be needed to force down prices and create new consumer expectations. A common estimate at the time had it that reducing America’s inflation rate by just one percentage point would cause economic damage of nearly 10% of GDP.

In this fraught world, central bankers risk falling into what Mr Krugman has called a timidity trap. The longer that knob-turning fails to get an economy out of the zero-rate rut, the less credible markets are likely to find subsequent attempts at regime change. Recent efforts to push interest rates into negative territory seem to have unnerved markets rather than sparked confidence.

Perhaps more importantly, central bankers tend not to adopt major shifts in mandates and targets unless urged to do so by popularly elected governments. It is difficult to muster Rooseveltian resolve without a Roosevelt. Expect growing scepticism about the power of knob-turning until voters choose politicians confident enough to wave a magic wand.

Read more: Slight of hand | The Economist